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THERE is an eerie stillness on the corner where the hardware store used to be, where families used to live, where the firefighters rushed in and died. Astoria Boulevard may be bustling just a short distance away, but at the point it intersects 14th...

It was Father's Day 2001 and they were all waiting for their husbands to come home. In East Rockaway, N.Y., Mary Fahey was packing up the family's winter clothes. A few miles away, Denise Ford was reading over the boys' cards to Daddy. In Port...

June 16, 2002, Sunday

When he was taken to the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens in late June, Joseph Vosilla's pelvis was crushed, most of his ribs were broken and several of his internal organs were ruptured. For more than a week, his doctors doubted...

With solemn pageantry and ritualized precision, two New York City firefighters were buried yesterday, mourned by their colleagues and families and eulogized for their bravery in losing their lives battling a burning neighborhood hardware store that...

Faced with a complex investigation into an explosion that ripped through a Queens hardware store on Sunday, fire officials said yesterday that they might hire consultants to help review evidence from the blast, which killed three firefighters. ...

June 21, 2001, Thursday

To the Editor: Re ''A Routine Fire, Then a Blast and a Mayday From Inside'' (front page, June 19): Another fire tragedy has claimed the lives of brave firefighters and is responsible for dozens of injuries. Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen is...

New York City fire investigators believe that one of the deadliest fires in the Fire Department's history can be traced to a purely accidental cause: two teenage boys, roughhousing on Father's Day, knocked over a can of gasoline in the backyard of a...

USUALLY, the endless asphalt carpet of the Long Island Expressway is enough to separate a firefighter and his family from the chaos of New York City. John Downing's job, his passion really, was battling blazes in New York City. But he lived his...

June 20, 2001, Wednesday

The city's firefighters began gathering yesterday to remember their lost colleagues at viewing services for two of the three firemen who lost their lives in Sunday's blaze. Smoothing their white gloves and straightening their caps, more than a...

They were washing their trucks and smoking cigars yesterday morning at the station house. They were trying to forget about the funerals. Two of their men died Sunday afternoon in a hardware store explosion in Astoria, Queens. Yesterday, the...